Tom Roper's Weblog

Chester and Sandown

205 Sandown: Barshiba
235 Sandown: Instalment
250 Chester: Speed Gifted
310 Sandown: Ask the Butler
325 Chester: Underworld

Buggers, pansies and pedants

A new exhibition, The Golden Generation, British Theatre 1945-1968, on theatre censorship opened at the British Library on Wednesday, and was previewed in the Guardian on Tuesday, though, apart from a press release, is curiously absent from the BL's website, though there is a good blog. A memo from the Lord Chamberlain, who exercised censorship over the theatre until 1968, instructs his staff that ,'we will allow the word 'pansy', but not the word 'bugger'.
Though the exhibition sounds fascinating, the effect is spoilt by the failure of the BL's press officer to do basic research. Even a look at Wikipedia, never mind the numerous reference works to hand in a national library, could have told them that there is no such person as a 'retired RAF colonel', as they had Jamie Andrews, head of modern manuscripts, say. The rank of colonel is used only in the British army. Retired officers from all three services will be writing to point this out.

The Curragh, Goodwood and Newmarket

125 Newmarket: Danehill Destiny
210 Goodwood: Patkai
305 The Curragh: Dushbhanna
315 Goodwood: Raven's Pass
335 Newmarket: Duke of Marmalade

Had the last race been run as planned at York, I would have backed New Approach, but on Newmarket's faster ground, I go for O'Brien's horse

From York to Newbury and Newmarket

The disruption caused by the move of Ebor fixtures to other courses has led to some upsets. I went for the following today; posting after the races, so can tell you only one, Lush Lashes, obliged.
Newbury 145: Marine Boy
Newmarket 205: Lush Lashes
Newmarket 235: Bonnie Charlie
Newmarket 305: Equiano
Newbury 325: Bauer

The shock of the new

I often fear that people believe the Sussex coastal town where I live, Seaford, to be a gerontocracy. Perhaps they're right. They've closed the town's youth centre and sixth form and now, in today's local paper, a town councillor sounds off against a planning application for a 3G mobile-phone mast, not on aesthetic grounds, nor on the spurious risk to health grounds that the feeble-minded usually invoke, but because no one in Seaford will want to use 3G because we're all too old.

Councillor Roy Bennett is quoted thus in the Sussex Express: 'How many people have these phones? They're expensive and I think the majority of people in Seaford just have mobile phones for convenience and emergencies. We are going to get more and more masts put up but I don't think the demand is there. Seaford has quite an elderly population and it will be years before it has a population which uses this sort of technology.'

Next time I come home on the train of an evening, I expect the train to be boarded at Bishopstone by a mob of vigilantes with councillor Bennet at its head, confiscating iPhones, iPods, laptops, and other evidence of the 21st century.

Ebor festival abandoned

The whole of the Ebor festival has been abandoned, thanks to the flooding on the Knavesmire. The Yorkshire Oaks and the Nunthorpe will be run at Newmarket on Friday, and the International on Saturday, though it's uncertain whether Duke of Marmalade and New Approach will take part in the rescheduled race.
The Ebor changes its name to the Newburgh and will be run at Newbury on Friday, while the Great Voltigeur will go to Goodwood on Saturday.

Songs my mother sang

It is only fair, having discussed the songs my father sang, to record my mother's. It will not take long, for I remember only one, the first verse of one of Sabine Baring-Gould's hymns, Now the Day is Over. Other than that, or on rare occasions when we were taken to church, when staying at my grandfather's house, I never heard her sing, in public or private.

The hymn is sentimental. I can only remember her singing the first stanza which, on its own, could be a secular song:
Now that day is over, night is drawing nigh, shadows of the evening steal across the sky.
Now the darkness gathers, stars begin to peep, birds, and beasts and flowers soon will be asleep.

Baring-Gould's religiosity becomes explicit in the verses which follow, but the first, on its own, is the lullaby I can remember her singing on summer evenings in my small bedroom in our house on Lensfield Road in Cambridge, as swifts and swallows cried outside. For all its sentimentality, I am not surprised at her choice, for it fitted her deep love of nature well. It worked too, for I can still remember making the intended association between the sleepiness of birds, beasts and flowers, and my own mental state.

The lullabies I would sing my own children, to no great effect, were more varied: Gilbert and Sullivan, folk songs and Papageno's aria from Die Zauberflöte, Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen, which I would chant repeatedly while walking a baby up and down the landing.

What I did on my holidays

On a recent trip to Normandy on the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry, I stumbled on an idea so good yet simple I am astonished it has never been tried before: French lessons on the ferry. Babette Kundrat of Cosmofil runs 50-minute classes on the Transmanche service for £6, or £10 for a couple, children being free. It's an excellent way to fill the four hours of the crossing, in between the rituals of watching the last of England disappear and the French coast appear at the voyage's beginning and end.

On the outward trip I joined a group of distinctly mixed abilities. It included adults and children, people with no French at all and those with a good grounding in the language. In spite of the wide spread we all learnt something. I enjoyed it so much I took a class on the return journey, and had the benefit of a 1:1 teacher-student ratio. When Babette explained to me the prepositional use of y and en, I was taken back to a hot summer afternoon at school over forty years ago when a master, possibly Mr Billingshurst or Mr Seymour, tried to teach the same point to me and my fellow schoolboys in 2 Alpha.

The school, the Perse, had a formidable reputation for language teaching. Long before I arrived, Chouville and de Glehn had pioneered the use of the Direct Method in teaching French. Indeed, the school's most famous teacher, its headmaster from 1902 to 1928, W D H Rouse, applied the same method to teaching classics†. I was lucky to start French at the age of eight at the prep school. Later, in the first form at the Upper School, I can recall being exposed to educational technology, in the shape of a tape-slide programme on the lives of M. and Mme. Thibaut. I remember little about la famiile Thibaut, except that they lived in a flat in Paris, and had children and a dog; but the fictional families of language teaching blur in my memory, and I would be hard put to distinguish them from the family in Latin classes, who owned a dog called Cerberus.

Later came O and A level, and Racine, Molière, Voltaire, Zola, Camus and Sartre. I also took German to O level with Mr Mitchell, Latin O level with Mr Dunkeley, and a year's worth of Russian with Mr Youdale. The proof of the school's reputation in languages is demonstrated by the careers of my contemporaries, for example David Yeandle, now a distinguished German scholar, who, I remember as a schoolboy, helped by his friend Rupert Limentani, son of a great Dante expert, inventing a language, complete with noun-declensions, irregular verbs, the works.

More modestly, I found that, under Babette's patient pedagogy, much returned that I had forgotten. I found, to my surprise, that I achieved that state that my teachers had always described as the aim of all language teaching, of finding myself thinking in the language.

†Direct Method and the Classics
C. W. E. Peckett
The Classical Journal, Vol. 46, No. 7 (Apr., 1951), pp. 331-367

York: Ebor Festival, first day: Juddmonte International Stakes

With the Knavesmire distinctly moist, I take New Approach rather than Duke of Marmalade in the big race today. Aidan O'Brien is more likely to score in the preceding colts race with Alessandro Volta.
145: Harrison George
215: The Cheka
250: Alessandro Volta
325: New Approach

Postscript: both Tuesday and Wednesday's racing have been abandoned. We wait to see what they can salvage if they can race on Thursday, Friday and possibly Saturday.

Nigel Jones on Patrick Hamilton

Patrick Hamilton's growing reputation over the past twenty to thirty years, said Nigel Jones, may be because we have moved closer to his inner world. I heard Nigel at an event at Brighton Waterstones, where he discussed the new edition of his life of Hamilton, Through a Glass Darkly, which I heartily recommend.

Nigel's major source, Hamilton's papers, then in the custody of the author's sister-in-law, give him a more detailed knowledge of Hamilton than anyone, and he is fascinating to hear. He defined Hamilton as a Brighton writer, one who flourished at a particular period, that of the end of empire, and one of the first to understand and describe fascism. His bizarre childhood, under the influence of his drunken, pretentious boor of a father, his desperate love-life, in pursuit of girls like Lily Connolly and Geraldine Fitzgerald, his alcoholism and sado-masochism, all contributed to his art, both the plays, successful in his lifetime, and the novels, less well received by his contemporaries, but now growing in stature.

Nigel mentioned Joe Wright's project to film Hangover Square, and he and an audience member had both seen the recent stage production at the Finborough in Earl's Court, which may go to the West End.

The papers are now in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas. where one of the audience had gone to consult them, and reported that Hamilton's shorthand was extremely difficult to decipher.

Jones, Nigel
Through a Glass Darkly: the Life of Patrick Hamilton
London: Black Spring, 2008
978-0-948238390